Fire and Ice
by lorcan
Summary: Who holds with those who favor fire? Character studies from Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice."
1. Fire

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To know that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

-Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"

* * *

_From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire_

Cameron is fire, of course. Emotions for every hour of the day and all the seconds in between. Desire, sure, but happiness, sorrow, joy, excitement, confusion, determination – is stubbornness an emotion? Sometimes that too, along with empathy, the trait that makes her nearly everyone's favorite doctor – except for the ones who like to listen to Chase talk – but which will take her youth and her vitality, sink wrinkles at the corners of her sparkling eyes and curve down the smile of her full mouth. It will take her hope and her optimism and last it will take her energy, until everything she is resides within the four brick walls of a hospital, and if she doesn't die there they will find her quickly in her apartment or her car because it is so strikingly unusual for her to miss a day of work.

Cameron is the fire of love and longing and nostalgia and eager plans for the future. She is the kind that burns bright and burns fast, and when it is gone there will be ash to sweep away but no embers to rekindle.

Cuddy is fire too. A different kind of fire – carefully directed, a useful fire, tended by the strong bellows of ambition and purpose. It has almost gotten away from her, a handful of times. When she was a child, always in trouble for being too bossy. More recently, when her desire for a child of her own nearly overwhelmed her. Once, it is suspected, years ago at Johns Hopkins with a blue-eyed lacrosse player. Mostly though, she uses her fire for good, like forest fires replenish land. Those around her who are most frequently out of control cannot break too far out of their designated areas when she has already burned up the oxygen everywhere else; cannot compete with the sheet of flame that is her devotion to her job and her love of her hospital and the work in it. She has been burning a long time, she knows how to mete out her resources so she burns for a long time yet.

Cuddy is most comfortable with the others who burn as well – respects their passion as they respect hers, and she is pleased with the strength of her own flame. Fire is not as consistent as ice, but if she has less time, she is confident she will be a brighter light.

House, oddly enough, is also fire. Most people think him ice, but he is like the underground fires in Florida, where once years past a lightning strike fired a coal bed beneath the loamy soil. It has burned for decades, that fire, nearly always underground, with only plumes of acrid smoke escaping in forgotten fields to show where it turns useless sand to beautiful glass. Mostly House just smolders, touchy about anything and everything, his fondly-caressed excuse of leg pain the blanket of soil to hide the real flames. Every once in a while, though, he erupts, like the muck fires, blazing unannounced from the earth to place others in real danger of being consumed. No one knows what might ignite that fire, when or where it might show itself next. He has passion; the few who truly know him can't deny that, for all he tries to cloak it in cynicism and keep-out vibes. A passion subverted by being shackled to a cane, by being stared at for his disability and not his brilliance, by the agonizing blend of disdain for humanity and the desperate, human need for contact with his fellow man.

House has enough coal beneath the surface to keep him burning, like Cuddy. No one can extinguish a fire they cannot find, but by the same token people seldom see the energy of his burning. For the most part, those around him all live with the continual faint whiff of smoke, a reminder that the muck fire is still there, maybe not imminently dangerous, but a force of nature all the same.

* * *


	2. Ice

_I know enough of hate, to know that for destruction ice, is also great, and would suffice_

* * *

Wilson is ice. He has Cameron's empathy, but he has never been fire. Has never had the energy it took to muster a flame. He floats through life, an ice floe on an Arctic sea, and the closest he gets to feeling his own warmth is when magma from a hidden House volcano billows its magma up just below him. He loves all his patients, he really does. He loves all of his ex-wives. Really, he genuinely likes all people. But Wilson has never been able to distinguish between regular human love and true passion; mistook the former for the latter once as a younger man and since then has been stuck in this cycle of hopes and disappointments that he thinks are significant only because he has never felt either true desire or true misery. For that, he has House, because opposites attract, and like moths and lightbulbs the two can't seem to stop trying to experience one another's state of being. It might not be healthy, might not end well, because ice melts, after all, and when it does the water could extinguish a fire.

Wilson will melt. He is not a glacier, is not big enough to withstand the heat he is drawn to again and again. Someone will go looking for him one day for their usual calming contact with the ice and find only a puddle on the floor. Maybe water, maybe blood. It depends on whether he merely melts or actually shatters.

Foreman is ice too. He is a glacier, straining in its own inimitable way to follow the track it chose, and if something less significant than itself stands in its way, it will be ground down. Foreman rarely looks back at where he has been and when he does it is with shame. Then he draws another layer of frozen crystals around himself and plods on. He is smart, of course, and good at what he does, so he doesn't need to hurry. He hurried when he was younger, and smaller, and slid more easily over the ground, but now he is a wall, a mountain, and proud of the track he tears in the soft earth, though not of where it started. He wants to make a mark on the world, without that world making too many marks on him, and so he picks up a few plants here and there, a few rocks, but is too forbidding to allow people stay for long, too cold for small fires to survive and too big for large fires to melt.

Foreman hears a cold voice whispering inside him sometimes, perhaps from the frozen body of a woman he killed, that he doesn't know where he is going, nor what he will do when he gets there. He always turns an icy shoulder to that voice and tries not to think that someday he will reach the end of his journey, and slip quietly into the sea, and behind him will be the track he gouged from the ground but that will only be what he has taken, and what has he given in return?

Chase is also ice. Chase is the deep, still ice of the Arctic, thirty, forty feet deep, and though it occasionally sheds great pieces from its shelves, it will always be too thick to destroy entirely. Without deliberate intent, that is. Chase is ice because ice is safety. He watches Cameron, a girl he loves, consume herself daily, a little more each time. He watches Wilson, a man he vaguely respects, begin to sweat and grow ever smaller as he tries to contend with a force not his own. Like candles, those people; they give light but must die themselves to offer it. No, he decided long ago, he wants nothing of fire, except perhaps to let Cameron wrap herself along his coastline every night, to feel that pleasant tingle as she melts just a little of him but bright enough he cannot put her out. It was self-defense, originally, his ice, and now it is habit, comfort. People like him have always existed, people like him always will. He is solid, dependable, doesn't need to move, like Foreman, to prove to himself that he lives. A nice person, if hard to penetrate beyond the first few feet of snow. A pleasant accent and a sunny smile, though he shares few personal opinions and even fewer personal facts.

Chase will realize, as the fire around him are extinguished one by one, and the lesser ice melts, that he has made one grave error in wrapping himself so snugly in cold. He will be able to tell himself he does not care when his father misses a football match or a woman breaks his heart, but he will also be left alone at the end of the world when the rest of the universe winks out.

* * *


End file.
